I am Eric Ries, entrepreneur and author of "The Lean Startup" - AMA!

This is Eric Ries. I’m an entrepreneur and the author of The Lean Startup. I’m writing a new book — two actually. The first one is a field guide for implementing Lean Startup principles called The Leader’s Guide, and it's available only through a Kickstarter campaign (21 days to go!). The second (working title: The Startup Way) is an official follow up to The Lean Startup, and will be released in in 2017.

My campaign is also an experiment designed to see how I can collaborate with all of you as part of my research process for The Startup Way. I wanted my new book to be researched, written and published in a way that is consistent with the methodology I believe in--and Kickstarter provides a platform for an even deeper level of collaboration with my readers. I'm also supporting a community for backers after the campaign so that they can share their stories, lessons, and experiences with me and with each other.

I'm really excited about the collaborative aspect of the campaign, and look forward to get the conversation going here on reddit.

Victoria from reddit is helping me out today with getting started today. AMA!

I'm a huge fan of the Lean Startup methodology, however I've talked with others about it and the one thing that comes up is building an MVP vs a Prototype. Generally I feel that that an MVP, while not feature complete, should still be robust and as bug free as possible, whereas with a prototype its acceptable to have bugs or to lack basic security considerations. Do you feel that there is a difference between the two, or are they essentially the same thing?

This is actually a hard question to answer. The reason is that the definition of a bug is defined by the customer. How do you know that your MVP is bug free if customers aren't using it? It's a common engineering assumption that we know what quality means and we can judge it for ourselves. But the truth is that if you don't know who the customer is, you don't know what quality means.

So, although I do try to make sure that an MVP is free of technical defects, I don't think it's possible to make it bug-free. The good news is that - at least in software - bugs are relatively harmless. If customers encounter them, you can fix them. Now that I work a lot with industrial, energy, and healthcare teams, we have to deal with this at a much deeper level. As my friends at GE like to say, nobody wants to fly on a minimum viable engine.

Finto (https://www.flinto.com) is a great prototyping tool. You can sketch on paper, take pictures of that, and drop it into Flinto and have a prototype in minutes. You can send to any phone and folks can download with ease. I like to think of an MVP as something that you have some real skin in the game on. Prototypes should have as little time spent on them as possible so you can build-measure-learn very quickly. Once you bring pixels and code into the equation, costs/time go up and it gets a bit more difficult to pivot without nullifying some or all of your cost/time investment. At Flinto-phase, your cost/time investment can remain very low and reveal great insight.

My question is: lots of business universities are incorporating entrepreneurship in their curriculum. Would you recommend studying entrepreneurship (as well as other business core) academically or just winging it and learning from experience?

I've been really excited to see the addition of real entrepreneurship curriculum to schools and especially business schools. I got to play an extremely small part in the revamp of the HBS curriculum that now requires every MBA to work on a startup as part of their degree.'

But the truth is that I think the bigger impact of those changes will be on non-entrepreneurs. Think of all the people who affect the startup ecosystem: bankers, corp dev, policy makers, general managers, PE/VC, etc. For them to actually understand a little bit about startups is going to be a big positive change.

In terms of your own education, I am a big believer in a general liberal arts education. That's what's helped me the most (thanks mom!). We live in a golden age of information about startups out there on books and blogs. There's plenty you can learn without formal schooling in business. Plus, YCombinator exists.

Hi Eric, your interview session at sxsw was one of the highlights of interactive for me.

My main question coming out of it was this. Can you give any concrete examples of using lean startup methods in larger companies, and physical manufacturing? My friends and I were trying to imagine what a lean prototype of a diesel engine might look like? Or how that would work in practice? Interesting thought for sure.

Here's a way to think about it. Physical mass production has a huge number of steps required to achieve delivery at scale: engineering, material science, supply chain, quality, compliance, sourcing, etc etc

If you were just trying to build and sell one single engine, how much of that work is really required? You'd be amazed what engineers can come up with when you reframe the problem this way.

I'd also recommend digging into some of the Lean such as the Toyota Way (Jeff Liker) and Lean Product and Process Development (By Allen Ward). In both books they talk about how lean tools apply to the development cycle. Liker cites the process around the Lexus engine as a key differentiator for the Lexus. While Ward discusses in detail the idea of Set Based Concurrent Design, which looks how how you can look broadly to develop your ideas and then narrow in on one specific model based on what they learn from it. I'd recommend those books for physical design. Ward uses LAMDA as his approach rather than B-M-L that Eric is a proponent of. I don't think there would be a big issue in translating one cycle to the other though.

Not yet. I really hope someone in academia will tackle this challenge in a rigorous way. So far all of my efforts to convince academics and foundations to work on it have produced little.

In the meantime, the best test of a startup idea is: do entrepreneurs find it helpful. And I don't mean just the famous ones whose public declarations are filtered through their PR teams. What about the thousands of entrepreneurs working in total obscurity all over the world? Like the ones on this map: http://lean-startup.meetup.com/

In a university, you could run a study where two teams of students receive a small amount of funding and asked to create a "startup" that serves the needs of students on academic probation. One team would be asked to use Lean Startup methods and the other would be left as a control. It would be easy to compare results (improved grades, etc), and you could even simulate the process of A/B/C venture capital. Best part: if it works, the school would benefit!

I left academia to start a company after completing my PhD but was involved in student and staff-led entrepreneurship activities in several capacities. Even attended the inaugural Business Model Competition at BYU with Nathan Furr and Steve Blank. Would be interested in hearing what was proposed? I agree there are huge experimental design challenges in trying to test "the lean startup methodology" in practice.

I went to the BYU IBMC last year. It's an awesome event! Eric commented that he had mentioned what he had in mind briefly in the afterword to The Lean Startup. Will check that out. I used to run a university New Venture Competition that had ~25 teams annually, using a few teaching techniques. The "lean" teams generally did better that the "traditional" teams, but only under certain circumstances. It's worth more study for sure.

TBH, I often have to give special advice to startups IN the valley. We're surrounded by unbelievable resources here but also a huge amount of hype and distraction. When in doubt, serve your customers and build something amazing. You can do that anywhere. The rest will follow.

Do you plan on writing about how to combine the biggest three Lean like philosophies into one framework? I'm talking about Lean Product Design, Lean Startup, and Agile software development. You touched on it briefly in Lean Startup, however I think that with the spread of Agile this is something that will need to be addressed to prevent confusion among practitioners.

I'm doing my best. One of things I'm most excited about in the Kickstarter campaign is it lets me write a book that's more detailed than a typical "airport business book" and can get into the nitty-gritty of development methodologies. All that material got cut from The Lean Startup.

I've read his "Managing the Design Factory" which was really interesting. Another good book out there that looks to merge things is "the Lean Mindset" By Tom and Mary Poppendieck which discusses Eric's book but focuses on a 4 step approach that Spotify uses, followed up with Agile steps.